Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Humanities, Caio Yurgel, on his newly published article in the Hispanic Review: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/880292/pdf
Abstract
The lives that inhabit Roberto Bolaño’s fiction serve as a contestation to the tenets of the Enlightenment. In this respect, water plays a key role in the author’s poetics: a metaphor for defeat and madness which both reflects and muddies the horrors of Reason. By examining Bolaño’s ability to create complex fictional biographies, this article identifies how these characters’ encounters with watery metaphors reveal the depths of Bolaño’s critique of the Enlightenment belief in an all-knowing and all-seeing Reason. To achieve our goal, we explore the lives of characters from four of his novels: 2666, Monsieur Pain, Amulet, and By Night in Chile. This article demonstrates how Bolaño conceives characters who are asked to take a stand in a world of diminishing certainties and changing tides. In doing so, he superimposes characters with minimal variations on the same backdrop of an ethically compromised world, like a scientist trying to pinpoint the exact moment that got us to where we now are.
Biography
Caio Yurgel has a background in philosophy, creative writing and comparative literature. His teaching and research are primarily concerned with literatures written in Chinese, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, with a focus on comparative and interdisciplinary approaches. He is the author of “Landscape’s Revenge: The Ecology of Failure in Robert Walser and Bernardo Carvalho” (DeGruyter, 2018) and the collection of essays “A Estética do Espetáculo: Cinco Teses em Walter Benjamin” (NEA, 2013), and is a winner of the prestigious Mario Pedrosa Award for Essays on Contemporary Art and Culture, awarded by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. He has also authored two award-winning novels: “Samba Sem Mim” (Saraiva, 2014) and “As Noites de Hong Kong São Feitas de Neon” (Gato Bravo, 2019).
Yurgel has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, where he also served as a joint post-doctorate researcher in partnership with the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Peking University.
